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Cruze 1.4 Intake Porting

What is Cruze plastic intake manifold porting? Is it the removal of the small "dam" at the point the intake attaches to the head? Does removing this "dam" make more power? Does it make less power? Does it make more or less low end torque? I have the head off putting in new pistons, so it would be easy to do now, IF, it would help.
We are making 249 HP @ 7400 and 206 # @ 4700 with HEP turbo upgrade and Trifecta tune.

What is Cruze plastic intake manifold porting? Is it the removal of the small "dam" at the point the intake attaches to the head? Does removing this "dam" make more power? Does it make less power? Does it make more or less low end torque? I have the head off putting in new pistons, so it would be easy to do now, IF, it would help.
We are making 249 HP @ 7400 and 206 # @ 4700 with HEP turbo upgrade and Trifecta tune.

Del Long

Not to go off topic here but what turbo did you select from HEP? And how are you making it to 7400 on stock springs? I know the HEP kit doesnt upgrade the valve train or pistons. Just curious where you got these parts. I assume you went custom forged pistons? Curious about your setup...

Typically intake porting is just "clearancing" of material from the manifold itself, internally and for port matching. As far as the dam is concerned I haven't wrenched into the car that far yet so I'm not sure. I'd expect high rpm gains over low. Can't speak to torque on this car but I lost some, not much, on the low end when going from an LS4 -> LS6 manifold on my other application.

Not to go off topic here but what turbo did you select from HEP? And how are you making it to 7400 on stock springs? I know the HEP kit doesnt upgrade the valve train or pistons. Just curious where you got these parts. I assume you went custom forged pistons? Curious about your setup...

Typically intake porting is just "clearancing" of material from the manifold itself, internally and for port matching. As far as the dam is concerned I haven't wrenched into the car that far yet so I'm not sure. I'd expect high rpm gains over low. Can't speak to torque on this car but I lost some, not much, on the low end when going from an LS4 -> LS6 manifold on my other application.

Snakeyes sent me a link to the post on "porting". I'm not sure I want to try it at this time. we're on a VERY close scehdule to get all the parts gathered up and reassembled in time to go the the SCCA SOLO Nationals on 9/01/12. We may not want to add ANOTHER variable.
I'm not ready to give away all hard work and research we've done to get this far. I will say the Vince at Trifecta has been super on helping us over come all the "I won't let ou blow this engine up" GM put into the ECM programming. The next test session after we got the engine working right we fell victim of the "GM TOO Tight ring gap" failure and lost cylinder 1 and 2. The block cleaned up at .009" over on number one, so we honed the others to the same spec. There is only one company, that we can find, that has made replacement pistons for the 1.4 and they only made one other set. They went to China!
Howie at HEP makes a favulous exhaust manifold, and trying to get hinm to make an Intake manifold also. We have the engine mounted for RWD and it would be VERY handi to have the throttle body on the other end.
After the SCCA Nationals, I hope we can have an announcement listing what worked for us, as well as what didn't. We do have stock springs. We have run it to 7830 RPM (7500+ over run) and there is NO evidence of valvle float. WE do NOT let it set on the revlimiter.

De Long, I've seen you on the Facebook Trifecta page. This is Andrei, in case you recognize me. I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys do with that engine and seeing your post of what works and what doesn't. You're a pioneer in this field and are doing much to help us understand what this engine is reliably capable of.

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